I was getting to grips with another aspect of Google Analytics today, I was actually trying to see if you could profile customers based on their visitor data – I’ve not quite worked this out yet, but I did find some very useful insights which I wanted to share.

First up I was checking out the biggest client that I manage, I decided I wanted to get to grips of what their visitors are like, so I started by segmenting by location, whilst I was doing this I found the perfect tool for identifying significant differences in data, the comparison graph:

As you can see from above, visitors from the UK are more likely to convert. This wasn’t that useful really though, as I expected this to be the case, since they are UK retailer! So I decided to drill down to the city level…

Most Search Marketers will know that the location is unlikely to be 100% accurate – in fact, far from it. It appears as though Google is recognising two London’s, my theory is that one is actually visitors from London, and the other is more likely to be visitors from anywhere in England with an ISP in London – although I could well be wrong, for purposes of accuracy we’ll have to discount visitors in this instance. So the biggest opportunity we can see is that those from Edinburgh are 30% more likely to convert than average! This could be a good indication that the retailer opens an actual retail outlet in Edinburgh as demand there appears higher for their products.

Ok, so I had something interesting, but knowing which city they are from isn’t that useful at the moment, so I decided to look at operating system to see what kind of performance the iPad was getting on this website:

This brought some very interesting and useful stats, first up, Macintosh users are converting 25% better than the average site user, useful to know. Then I look at the iPad, not great, it obviously doesn’t have an iPad specific design, but since traffic from iPad users is less than 1%, this isn’t a big deal. Then you notice the iPhone, ok so iPhone is giving only 1% of traffic, but its conversion rate is significantly below the average – perhaps this means a mobile version of the site is worth creating?

So this got me thinking, perhaps I should check out other clients and see if Macintosh users generally convert better – this didn’t really give any correlation, I imagine because of all the different browsers, so I checked them out by browser type:

It looks like Safari, Chrome and IE are performing well, FireFox is underperforming a little, so I drilled down further to see what versions might be causing problems:

Now I’ll admit, I’m certainly no expert when it comes to design & usability, but I’d probably check out the site in version 3.6.8 and 3.6.6 to see if there is any problem. Next I decided to take a look at the connection speed:

Most of this looked fine, as you would expect dialup doesn’t convert as well – so perhaps the site needs speeding up a bit. But then I noticed that OC3 connections were 56% less likely to convert, why was this? I didn’t know what OC3, but James told me it was fibre optics, so we segmented it again by location – all in the UK, so then we change it to service provider and got this:

At this point we both sighed in aknowledgement. AOL. That explained a lot! (For those of you that aren’t familiar with AOL, they were marketed towards those who are unfamiliar with computers). So it seemed from this that we could conclude that those that are less able at using computers are less likely to buy – this may be because they aren’t comfortable ordering on the Internet or perhaps they are having difficulty using the website – certainly an area worth looking into.

Anyways, try going through your reports with the comparison graph, its a great way to begin to understand your visitors and you may find a useful opportunity such as an uncatered for market or a problems with a particular browser.

Combining Segments
Once you’ve done that you can combine segments – I’ve not quite worked out the best way to do this yet, but I’m working on it. I’ve created what I call a “Web Rookie” – this is basically a visitor running Windows 7 with Internet Explorer 8 (basically the default package you get when you buy a PC). This isn’t a great example of a segment or “persona” and I think once I get better at this I can develop better ones. This persona gets an average conversion rate of 0.51% compared to the site average of 0.47% – which means they are 8.5% more likely to convert:

If anyone has a lot of experience of creating persona’s from Analytics, I’d be very interested to hear your comments/opinions, I’m particularly interested in how people do it without making assumptions about their data (e.g. persona’s are data driven).

David Whitehouse

David has honed his skills as an SEO and has become the "go to guy" for Google Analytics. He's a passionate Internet marketeer and he enjoys helping clients maximise their potential.

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22 Comments

@kevinjgallagher - http://twitter.com/kevinjgallagher

great article I love this stuff there is so much data in analytics’s can be overwhelming sometimes.

Going to try this!

David Whitehouse

Cheers Kevin, have fun!

sujit - http://sujit-seo.blogspot.com

Really Google Webmaster is a great tools … it depends upon us how to discover and extract hidden possibility through it .. Good post regarding problem and opportunities “In-Page Analytics” also a helpful section in GA … thnx a lot

Yehoshua @ Analytics Ninja - http://www.analytics-ninja.com

As part of your segmentation process, I would also consider adding users who searched with Bing. Bing is the default search engine in IE. The ‘web rookie’ will likely not know how to change their default search engine. It is certain worth investigating to see if you find any trends.

David Whitehouse

Good point, I’d not thought of that, I might go have a look now and see what that brings…

Glenn Ferrell - http://www.gfwebsoft.com

Dave,

Great post. Really opened my eyes to doing more of drill-down in these areas. Serves as a great tutorial !

Hi David,
Great article and thanks for sharing it. There never seem to be enough hours in the day to look into these things and so the more people that share this data the better. There are definitely some interesting insights!
It’s prompted me to dig into my own data a bit more.
Thanks again!

David Whitehouse

Yeah I know what you mean, I was actually trying to create personas but I didn’t get very far. This is a quick way to get insights though, I feel.

Vishal Gohel - http://www.referencebooster.com

Very useful article, got to learn more about Analytics. Thanks buddy!

Looking for more articles from you.

David Whitehouse

Cheers Vishal

Vlad - http://www.poweredbysearch.com

Great article. There are many free tools online that you can use to analyze your website, but I guess this is one way to do it. It’s probably even better than most tools because you have most of the information you need in one spot. Thanks for the article David.

Jeff Tincher - http://about.me/JeffTincher

David, great article and I’m going to see if I can replicate this type of report for my business. I really like how you looked at possible locations to “open a store” by looking at the demand and conversions.

there’s SO much more I haven’t yet touched with analytics that I’m going to have to start testing the waters!

Roshan - http://twitter.com/nepalsites

interesting research. although i would say that it is not the complete picture by any means. For example, in case of analytics of a non-technical website, visitors using default browsers are more likely to convert.

Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za

Nice one David, wow, for all the years I’ve used Analytics, I never really thought of applying this approach to a client. Guess it’s one of those things that’s so easily looked over, yet so useful.

Big up for bringing this up!

David Whitehouse

Cheers Chris, to be honest I only just “discovered” it. It does seem Google Analytics can go into a lot of depth.

Chris M - http://www.imod.co.za

Absolutely David, I’ve been lost inside Analytics for hours many times!

Shane Jones - http://www.shanejones.co.uk

Nice one 🙂 Can see what I’m going to be doing all Monday morning now

Thanks

Paul Woodward - http://www.easywatering.co.uk

Great Post, I use Google Analytic to track our keyword Hozelock, but just for the basic items but have spent a few hours looking at what information it contains. Lots of useful details and I have spent all day adjusting my campaigns and gained a better understanding of where the traffic comes from and what’s good and what’s bad.

Robert Somerville - http://www.gurubob.co/

Thanks David…while I use Google Analytics frequently I wasn’t aware of the specific functionality you highlight in your post. I’m looking forward to assessing my site in the same way.

GuruBob

Patrick - http://kuriatko.sk

I am using the google analytics. but i dont know what means bounce rate, it is good 100% or 0 %?

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